Hyper Light Breaker devs were "caught off guard a bit by how oppressive the difficulty was for players," even if some people are "very upset that we’ve made it easier"

Heart Machine's open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker landed with a thud but has noticeably improved since launch and will soon begin a proper comeback tour of monthly updates, as the devs told us in a recent wide-ranging interview. One of the biggest day-one surprises for the devs, who anticipated some degree of early access growing pains, was the overwhelmingly negative player response to the game's harsh difficulty curve, which has since been toned down to accommodate people who didn't make the game.

"Because of our frequent evolution internally, it can be difficult for the team to judge how easy to learn the game is - we’ve learned literally dozens of different versions, and even small tweaks (like, say, changing the number of medkits you start with) can have major impacts on how you play, and how you learn to play," says lead producer Michael Clark. "We were caught off guard a bit by how oppressive the difficulty was for players - this can be difficult to judge internally because, of course, we’ve all played it for hundreds of hours, and as we tuned the game to be more challenging for us, we overshot."

It's a fascinating quandary of game dev: how do you gauge the average player's experience when you know your own creation front to back? With play testing, obviously, but then how many people can you bring in to test? Are they of average skill? And on it goes.

Super Smash Bros. boss Masahiro Sakurai has advised game devs to try beating their own game while playing with a handicap like only using one hand in order to understand the difficulty. FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki, it seems, doesn't have to try: he says "I absolutely suck at video games" but can still get through gauntlets like Elden Ring by using "every scrap of aid that the game offers."

Changes to enemy behavior and the addition of a starter medkit helped numb the sting, but Hyper Light Breaker is still a difficult game, and that's very much by design. "There are some saying it is impossible, as well as a splinter group who is very upset that we’ve made it easier with our first two updates," Clark adds. "The game is intended to be fully playable solo or in multiplayer, and it is intended to be challenging but fair."

Playing solo ratchets up the challenge considerably, especially since the world scaling favors groups. It's much easier to manage mobs or tank-and-spank bosses when you have teammates. Alone, it's even easier to get overwhelmed.

"I think the game is ultimately easier in multiplayer, and I think most games wind up that way whenever there is co-op," Clark says. "Having said that, we tune difficulty around the solo baseline."

After a hard launch, Hyper Light Breaker dev says negative reviews were key because "you can’t pay for QA of that caliber! That all comes from true giving a damn."